| "To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you love for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than home."
--Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again
It is well-documented: feelings are fickle, always on the go, waxing and waning -- sometimes, perhaps too often utterly disappearing. The "magic" of romance is fleeting, and relationships are more or less subject to the problem of diminishing returns. Over time, one gives more and more only to receive less and less. Thus the common question, "How to make love last?" As if love were an enterprise, and profitable due to its longetivity, duration. Therefore, books are written to offer "solutions" -- like business manuals suggesting tactics to ensure the continued success of one's company.
Mine is also a suggestion, a recommendation of tactics, but of a very different kind -- and suggests abandoning this 'business' model of romance. I seriously doubt the value of longevity -- as if there were any necessary meaning to a given amount of time. It is not the quantity of time that counts, but the quality. "Not the years of one's life, but the life in one's years!" Thus I advocate intensity and depth of feeling, existential responsibility, and an irrevocable sense of one's singularity, estrangement -- a final uniqueness that no relational identity can ever capture.
To relate -- ironically. To know that this other, this stranger beside one, can never be one's home, that one cannot ever fully and finally rely on the other. One cannot even, really, rely on oneself! But one continues living, relating -- as if it were possible for "two to become one". As if, while knowing the matter is ultimately impossible.
Estrangement is a basic condition of relating. We are in love with the mystery of the other. But, too much mystery is too alienating; too little, too boring, too frustrating -- the tensions disagreeable, 'out of whack'. That tension, or friction, is very sensitive -- mysterious in its own right -- and our feelings are its measurement. Yes, we must interpret, 'read' these feelings, construe them. How to respond (cope, deal with) is up to us, our rather limited choices.
My choice is to dare fight against my sheeplike insecurities, which compel me to settle for less, to believe the pasture where I've currently alighted is "just as good" as the others, and moreover, less trouble -- if the grass is always greener, why bother seeking other fields? I want to go to war against the sheep and produce, by progressively struggling, a wolf.
The wolf does not balk once his/her feelings are "hurt" -- that is the inescapable bite of life, the price of soulful existence. Dukkha, at bottom, and not docile happiness. But the wolf does not only feel the pain of loneliness, of separation -- also the joy! That one has struggled to be able to part ways from the packs with which he/she has associated. To not avoid the sorrowful truth of existence, to not pretend.
Wolves come and go. And don't take events personally. One does not ask the other to care for him/her "as a person" -- as if one merited "unconditional" love, respect, and could 'reasonably' claim the right to be more fascinating than any others for a lifetime (or even for a few minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years). The wolf interests an other, is valuable for a time -- and only for a time. There is beauty in the loss, the waning of feelings -- the short autumn that promises a long winter.
I do not want to fight the onset of winter, to make believe that the spring flowers are yet blossoming, or the summer sun still soothes and warms one's skin. I want to embrace winter as a condition of all other 'seasons' -- likewise, the distance and disregard of another as inextricably related to their love and intimacy. To deeply love the winter, even as one shivers.
This solitary journey would not be so lonely, even -- were there other wolves, others harsh enough to respect themselves, their passions, and not fight them toward a sheep's ideal of "happiness". While the wolf likely cannot become fully wolf -- there is yet sheep lurking in the wolf, I say better to challenge oneself to become courageous, to go out and seek life with gusto, rather than "challenge" oneself to quiet one's passions, to live more cowardly. I aim to resist those who would tempt me to "content" myself with sheephood. Better to go it alone, than bargain for a "community" that I loathe, often hate. To work toward riches, to risk keeping desire for them burning in my heart, while I cope with poverty. To care, and thus keep fighting. To be a warrior.
Just as a traveler returns to destinations that offered temporary enjoyment, evoked beautiful sorrows -- wolves can return to other such wolves. Not expecting to "settle down" and "make it last" this time, but as strangers impassioned by their uncanny attractions to each other -- not just in spite of these desires impossible-to-fulfill, because of. To share the sorrow, to laugh at one's open, unadorned wounds! And cry. An intense vulnerability before which one no longer feigns strength or control -- that is the only strength. To return, and know that eventually -- one will have to move on again and again. To be true to oneself, to reality, one must not linger too long. One must struggle to let go, and set forth once more, hit the road. |
